Annie Pho: Incorporating game design elements into library services

Recently my colleague and I were awarded a grant to implement a digital badge pilot program at my work. Librarians often try to think of innovative ways to engage our students in teaching information literacy concepts, and trying out a digital badge program is one of them. For those who are unfamiliar, people can earn digital badges for skills they develop online, receive credit for their activities, and display them to their peers. In video games, players are often awarded badges or unlock achievements when they have met certain milestones in the game. This helps to motivate the player to continue on with the game, or explore alternative quests. Digital badges take that concept of benchmarking achievements in games and puts them in a real life setting.

I’m interested in seeing how libraries can use this kind of system to motivate learning and assess what our patrons learn along the way. Mozilla recently released their Open Badges project and so the badges that I develop for my library will be able to be integrated into the Mozilla infrastructure. In my opinion, the skills people learn in the library are translatable and empower our patrons to be lifelong learners.

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Cycling for libraries is a library publicity campaign organized by the International Association for Library Advocacy.